Mithu Sen (born 1971 in West Bengal) is an Indian conceptual artist whose work moves between painting, drawing, poetry and performance. She trained in painting at the Kala Bhavan of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, and later completed a postgraduate programme at the Glasgow School of Art in the United Kingdom on a Charles Wallace India Trust award for 2000 to 2001. Before turning to non-communicative language, she was a practising poet in Bengali.
Her work often addresses the body in its physical, erotic and sexless forms, and the self as a matrix of identities and myths that questions social norms and fixed categories. Sen works with a wide range of surfaces, materials and processes, which she calls "byproducts" of a larger process. Her notion of "radical hospitality" explores the line between distance and intimacy, while in her performances she creates "non-language", an abstract body of gibberish text that challenges language as a proprietary means of communication.
Her distinctions include the Skoda Prize for Indian contemporary art in 2010, the first awarded, and the Prudential Eye Award for Best Emerging Artist Using Drawing in 2015. She has exhibited at Chemould in Mumbai, at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, and at documenta 26 in Kassel. Her legacy lies in the debate on language, the body and identity in contemporary Indian art. She lives and works in New Delhi.